An organized army on Twitter using popular names.

Impersonation is nothing new, hundreds of such accounts are active everywhere, Twitter, Facebook etc, but many have different reasons. It’s actually quite easy, just use a word “Parody” somewhere in corner and impersonate any celebrity, journalist, gain thousands of followers, earn money, spread your agenda.
While Twitter verify real handles but then who cares if the tweets match their bias and likes ? Why not take it further, take screenshots and share on WhatsApp cause it’s a platform who just sees the photo and content, they don’t even know about twitter, leave verification apart.

Loosely this translates to “Intellectuals got my account suspended, what do they think, they can suppress my voice ?, All my old friends, please follow my this account and also all retweet this tweet in large numbers”
Given this account with a celebrity/journalist name and his/her photo, many usually fall for it, thinking it to be true and follow the command.

On twitter having large number of followers have reasons, real verified celebrity handles as people/fans wants to know about them, journalists/anchors to interact with them, or any popular figure. Also many get huge number of followers because of their humor, talent etc.
But how are these fake handles have thousands of followers ? Cause they are organized, having same agenda, political, religious.

And the clue here is that almost all of these accounts are retweeting each other, asking people to follow each other and above all very active and fast.

While Steve Jobs added “i” to Phone, these ids added ‘i’ to the celebrities names 🙂

This is the original account of Sweta Singh, Executive Editor, Programming, Aaj Tak which was never suspended at all.

Above all, the fake id is followed by verified people

Agenda –

Interesting stuff is, this handle has more than 5000 tweets/retweets just within a month, 48 thousand followers and all history deleted, no tweet before December 2017. Miracle ? Nope, it’s result of organized hard work. Scroll their timeline and you will find these all belongs to Right Wing agenda, same tweets, same issues.

Making Money –

In fact they also mint money using this strategy. With such large number of followers they can participate in paid/inorganic hashtag trending too. There are many Social influencing companies who outsource and pay to such twitter handle to trend a hashtag, usually such hashtags are for any move, any new product launch etc. For example following is for hashtag – #SportLooksGoodOnDelhi